Sin City      

“Sin City” is a movie based on, or extracted from, three graphic novels by Frank Miller, who also directed.

It’s a slick, beautiful, gory mess, and I can’t get enough of it, especially now that it’s showing right here at the Somerville Theatre in Davis Square.

The first story is about Marv, a tough-guy played with outstanding intensity by Mickey Rourke.

Touched with kindness for the first time by a beautiful woman, he goes on a suicidal mission to avenge her death.

The second story is about Clive Owen’s lover-boy Dwight, who helps to save the women in Old Town from the intruding gangsters.

In the last story, and old cop named Hartigan and played by Bruce Willis sacrifices everything for a young woman named Nancy, played by Jessica Alba.

Of course, all the above men are ex-cons, murders and street thugs, and the women are prostitutes and strippers.

There are many more characters, and each story weaves into the others, providing a sense of depth to the narrative, even while reality remains very clearly distant from this world.

Rather than showing the world in realistic ways, this movie shows things as close to pure fiction as moving images can be. Shot in black and white with only splotches of color, it draws the eye without drawing any tears.

“Sin City” is, above all things, violent. But it’s never real, and it never seems to hurt.

I have seen  “Sin City” three times, and each of the last two times I tried to count how many castrations and decapitations take place. Each time, I have lost count.

Is this because there are so many, or because it’s so easy to get caught up in the fun? Maybe it’s both, but I think from now on I’m going to stop counting, and just enjoy.

Why is it so fun? Why should I enjoy watching someone get shot up, beat up, cut up, dismembered, and dunked into a toilet? Maybe we should ask
Dwight, who at one point said, “There’s nothing like all your friends showing up with lots of guns.”

My friends don’t have any guns, but all the characters in “Sin City” do, so I suggest we all hang out there more often.